Emily Yoffe Needs Advice

I believe you can write a column and strongly recommend that women be careful about drinking too much while still holding men accountable for their behavior. Ms. Yoffe wrote a column discouraging women from over indulging but did not hold men accountable. That’s not acceptable. She said she did hold them accountable but I did not get that from her writing, if you did please comment.

Is this a business ethics problem. Yes.

Giving people advice is a serious business. Implying that female drinking puts too much temptation out there is different than saying taking precautions is wise. The difference is where you place the responsibility. The responsibility is always on the perpetrator not the victim.

Okay, Emily Yoffe–obviously alcohol makes you randy and more aggressive, no matter your gender. And obviously college-aged women invariably act like Lindsey Lohan when they consume too much of it, and, worse yet, can be unwittingly drinking a mixed drink full of date rape drugs. However, to somehow suggest that their consumption of alcohol creates a more rape permissive environment and only seeks to embolden potential rapists is, well, like saying women should be raped for wearing provocative clothing. Furthermore, a woman can be discussing her menstrual cycle while drinking O Doul’s in a beekeepers uniform, and college dudes will still try to rape her. As we all know, rape is purely about dominance. The introduction of alcohol, although certainly offering rapists a golden ticket, is by no means the fault of the woman or somehow the only invitation to rape. And this is coming from a guy, Emily Yoffe.

Yoffe is wrong, as her Slate colleague Amanda Hess, tells us, because you don’t solve a structural problem with a personal self-help solution. We didn’t deal with drunk driving in this country by telling people, “hey, you can’t control drunk drivers, so minimize driving when the bars are closing!” We dealt with it by a combination of a massive public awareness campaign, and imposing real accountability- not just jail sentences, but more prosaically, license suspensions. Drunk driving costs the drunk drivers something now, and it didn’t three decades ago. We didn’t end drunk driving deaths, but we knocked them down a lot.

Yoffe is wrong because rapists are not weather systems. I mentioned this earlier today, and I’ve written about it before. The implicit model of rapists in her piece is one of an unthinking phenomena, one that does not respond to stimulus, that therefore we can’t do anything about but get out of the way. There’s a pernicious undercurrent to this thinking in many areas, from forest fires to global climate change – but for a moment, let’s just accept that there are some things we can’t prevent or deter. All we can do it look out for them, avoid encountering them, and minimize the damage when they occur. Yoffe, and many others, treat rape like this. That’s wrong. Often, they start from the proposition that rapists are bad people who don’t misunderstand, but rather rape because they want to. That’s true. But they take the wrong lesson from the research that shows us that. They infer that the rapists are irrational and can’t be influenced, when the Predator Theory research indicates just the opposite: that they do, in fact, respond to stimulus, by choosing the tactics that are least likely to get them caught. I’ve seen it in small, tightly-knit communities, too. When they have enough victims report and can no longer convince people of narratives about crazy victims, misunderstandings or one-time poor judgment, they move on to new communities where they can get a fresh shot at bullshitting their way through their victims’ reports. Since we know that they use the tactics that work and respond rationally to stimulus, we know that they are not like weather systems and we should discard that model.